Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 89 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:89

فَرَوْحٌ وَرَيْحَانٌ وَجَنَّتُ نَعِيمٍ

“Then [for him is] rest and bounty and a garden of pleasure.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Three things are given, and the first is the word for a cool breeze found after the heat has been punishing.

A reflection

Not rest and bounty. A breeze.

The usual English is rest and bounty, or comfort and fragrance, and both are too abstract.

One commentary gives the derivation and it changes the register completely. The word, it says, comes from their saying I found rawḥ. A man found a breeze he could take relief in, out of the distress of heat.

So the first thing given to the brought near at the moment of death is a draught of cool air in a stifling room.

The lexicons support it. The root is wind and moving air, and from it breath, and the spirit by which there is life. From it come relief, rest and gladness: finding open space after being closed in. One of them puts the picture as the cool after a stifling day.

That is an extraordinary thing to be the first item. Not a verdict, not a garden, not a welcome. Air.

And it is exact, because of what the previous ayat have described. A soul at a throat. A chest that will not fill. A room full of people watching a man fail to breathe.

The word given to him is the word for breath.

The commentaries then fan out, as they do, and the glosses are worth keeping: relief, mercy, forgiveness, gladness, rest from the world. One reads it as the going out of his soul into a sprig of basil. Another as life and remaining.

But the root's own picture is the one to hold, because it answers the scene rather than decorating it. The thing the man most immediately lacks is the thing he is first given.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.